A new psychological syndrome is hitting headlines in Japan and neighbouring Asian countries. Named "smile-mask syndrome" by leading Osaka psychiatrist Makoto Natsume, the disorder primarily affects women in service industries whose jobs require them to smile all day. After a day of smiling, he says, these women find themselves increasingly unable to turn off the smile. Even devastating bad news can't wipe the inappropriate smile off their faces, much to their distress.
Dr Natsume predicts a national wave of mental illness including depression and other disorders as a result of women being forced to repress authentic emotions in order to wear a smile all day.
There may be another effect happening in addition to the repression of real feelings. According to the New York Times, "some researchers have tried to ... understand the states of mind that produce smiles. We think of them as signifying happiness, and indeed, researchers do find that the more intensely people contract their zygomaticus major muscles, the happier they say they feel. But this is far from an iron law. The same muscles sometimes contract when people are feeling sadness or disgust, for example."
So the wearer of the false smile may, paradoxically, be led to feel sad, by being forced to chronically contract the muscles required to produce smile.
No comments:
Post a Comment